Public Defenders to Zohran Mamdani: Drop Jessica Tisch
Adopted by ALAA membership vote on December 19, 2025
As public defenders and as workers, we urge Mayor-Elect Mamdani to drop Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. Tisch’s record makes clear that she should play no role in an administration that values justice. Her tenure has strengthened a policing regime that protects the wealthy, criminalizes the poor, and escalates the repression of political dissent. Under her leadership, stops of Black and Brown New Yorkers have surged, and the policing of pro-Palestine demonstrators and other movements for justice has intensified. We see the consequences of these choices every day in courts and communities across the city.
As workers, we know that policing is an instrument of billionaire class power, expressed in who the NYPD protects and who it targets. Police surveil our picket lines, arrest strikers, break up our protests, and defend the political interests of the wealthy. They swarm low-income neighborhoods over retail theft and fare evasion while ignoring wage theft, landlord abuse, and corporate crime. And while essential services that working-class New Yorkers depend on are starved for funding, the NYPD absorbs billions.
Tisch embodies this fusion of billionaire and police power. She is not only the leader of the largest police force in the country, but an heiress to the multibillion-dollar Tisch empire — a family whose fortune in energy, hotels, and insurance has long been deployed to expand the NYPD’s power. Through the NYC Police Foundation, the Tisch empire has bankrolled the department’s propaganda infrastructure, international operations, and surveillance technology, underwriting a police force that shields the wealthy while punishing the poor. She wields the NYPD to serve her class at the direct expense of ours.
Her alignment with Israeli state violence is consistent with this same project of repression. Tisch has praised, trained alongside, and welcomed officials responsible for the genocide in Palestine. Earlier this year, NYPD trainings under her watch labeled keffiyehs and even watermelons as “antisemitic symbols,” turning Palestinian cultural expression into something to be policed. Her pledge to the ADL to bring down the force of the NYPD upon New Yorkers who protest Israel makes her unfit to lead any agency that claims to serve a multiracial, immigrant city.
Throughout her tenure, Tisch has expanded the NYPD’s power and reach — from reviving Broken Windows enforcement to deepening the city’s surveillance dragnet through the Domain Awareness System, a multibillion-dollar fusion of cameras, license plate readers, biometric data, and social-media monitoring. Reappointing her guarantees the continuation of an NYPD defined by violent protest crackdowns, aggressive crowd-control tactics, and protection for ICE as it terrorizes immigrant New Yorkers. It empowers her fight to preserve the NYPD’s notorious “gang” database in direct defiance of Mamdani’s campaign pledge to abolish it. And even if Mamdani succeeds in formally dissolving the SRG, appointing Tisch ensures that the policing model it pioneered — militarized protest response and targeted repression — will continue under her leadership. Most damningly, she overrode the Civilian Complaint Review Board and a judge to protect the NYPD sergeant who killed Allan Feliz in 2019, a stark reminder that even lethal violence is insulated from accountability under her command. Since Mamdani pledged to appoint Tisch, she has not come around to his positions as he promised. Instead, it is Mamdani who is now wavering on the criminal legal system commitments he made to New Yorkers during the campaign. Those promises — abolishing the gang database, dissolving the SRG, and giving the CCRB final say in police discipline — cannot be realized while she remains in place.
ALAA-UAW Local 2325, the union of over 3,500 New York City legal services workers, urges Mayor-elect Mamdani to drop Tisch immediately. A city committed to justice cannot be built on the foundations of repression, occupation, and billionaire police power.